AFTER 47 YEARS, ALCOHOL RULED OUT IN EUGENE O'NEILL'S DEATH

Tribune News ServicesCHICAGO TRIBUNE

Eugene O'Neill, the playwright of souls in search of forgiveness, has been given an absolution of sorts himself, in the pages of a medical journal.

Contrary to O'Neill's own suspicion that heavy drinking in his youth caused the brain disease that crippled him later in life, a report Wednesday confirms that he died of a rare brain disease but says that alcohol was not to blame.

The progressive deterioration of O'Neill's brain was due to a rare genetic disorder, said Dr. Bruce H. Price, chairman of the neurology department at Boston's McLean Hospital and co-author of an article in the New England Journal of Medicine. He said the pattern of O'Neill's illness didn't follow a typical path of alcoholic disease.

"It was bad luck of the genetic draw that took him," Price said.

The article, coming 47 years after O'Neill's death at 65, is based on a new analysis of his medical records and autopsy. It describes in detail the illness that stopped him from writing during the last 10 years of his life.

O'Neill had long had a tremor in his hands, but it worsened markedly in 1939, when he was 51. By 1941, he was having trouble controlling a pencil. Doctors mistakenly diagnosed Parkinson's disease.

In 1943, he finished the play, "Moon for the Misbegotten," and soon gave up writing.